Lightweight though often entertaining reflections on an obsession with beauty. Once a homely teenager, Siman (Pizza Face, 1991) is now a gay man obsessed with physical beauty. With his long-nosed friend, Dorothy, a lesbian Playboy editor, he embarks on a ``trip'' into the world of beauty as a way of resolving old feelings of exclusion. Along the way, Siman encounters the beautiful (female bodybuilder Lenda Murray; Playboy ``student bodies'' Amanda and Kelly; supermodels such as Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford) and their creators (plastic surgeons, photographers, and model-agency doyenne Eileen Ford—who notes forthrightly that modeling is about money, as well as about dreams). Many of the interviews are funny, especially one with Sy Sperling, president of the Hair Club for Men, which sells hair replacement systems; Sperling says he didn't give money to New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's last campaign because ``I don't want to promote a guy who is promoting the bald or covered look...I don't want people thinking this guy is a client.'' Siman also brings us through some of his own (not wholly successful) attempts to rid his face of acne scarring: silicone injections, dermabrasions, and a chemical peel (one doctor considers wrinkles a deformity). He has a lively style and is at his best when flippant, pointing out, for example, that straight, white-collar men didn't go to the gym until recently because they were afraid that muscles would make them look either working-class or gay. However, Siman's journey doesn't appear to have yielded any important ideas or provocative conclusions; indeed, wherever he attempts profundity, his prose gets murky, and some of his assumptions—that there is an objective standard of beauty, that the young are almost always more attractive than the old—are both conventional and downright silly. Underlying the tongue-in-cheek tone is the sense that Siman takes beauty all too seriously.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-89080-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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